The Archipelago of the Sun finds Hiruko still searching for her lost country, traveling around the Baltic on a mail boat. With her are Knut, a Danish linguist; Akash, an Indian in the process of moving to the opposite sex; Nanook, a Greenlander who once worked as a sushi chef; Nora, the German woman who loves Nanook but is equally concerned with social justice and the environment; and Susanoo, a former sushi chef who believes he is responsible for the entire group. But weren't they originally supposed to sail to Cape Town, and then on to India? Puzzled by this sudden change in route, which no one seems to remember anything about, they encounter long dead writers (Witold Gombrowicz, Hella Wuolijoki) on board, plus a cast of characters from literature, art, and myth. As the very existence of Hiruko and Susanoo's homeland is called into question, Susanoo meets the mythical princess he will marry, and Hiruko tells the others that she herself will be a house in which everyone can live. Though the trilogy comes to its end, their journey seems likely to continue.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"Tawada is immune to the seduction of ideal worlds. Even when speculative, her fiction still manages to operate in the world that we actually inhabit: one characterized by slippages, ambiguity, and a history of territorial entanglements that began long before twentieth-century globalism-entanglements that, in fact, go back so far that they might be one of the few things coterminous with being human." -- The Baffler "Tawada's playful and deeply inventive new novel ... succeeds brilliantly, sketching a grim global dilemma with the sort of wit and humanism that Italo Calvino, in a discussion of lightness in literature, described as 'weightless gravity.'" -- Julian Lucas - The New Yorker "Even one's mother tongue is a translation." -- Yoko Tawada "Proof that thoughtful novels of ideas can be fun as well as provocative." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred) "Tawada again proffers linguistic illuminations." -- Terry Hong - Booklist
Sprache
Verlagsort
Produkt-Hinweis
Broschur/Paperback
Klebebindung
Maße
Höhe: 203 mm
Breite: 132 mm
Dicke: 15 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-8112-3979-0 (9780811239790)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has published several books-stories, novels, poems, plays, essays-in both languages. She has received numerous awards for her writing including the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Goethe Medal, and the National Book Award. New Directions publishes her story collections Where Europe Begins (with a Preface by Wim Wenders) and Facing the Bridge, as well her novels The Naked Eye, The Bridegroom Was a Dog, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, The Emissary, Scattered All over the Earth, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, Suggested in the Stars, and forthcoming in autumn 2025 is Archipelago of the Sun, the final novel in her Scattered trilogy.
Margaret Mitsutani has lived in Japan since the mid-1970s and was a finalist for the National Book Award for her translation of Yoko Tawada's Scattered All Over the Earth and winner of the National Book Award for her translation of Tawada's The Emissary. She also translates Japan's 1994 Nobel Prize laureate Kenzaburo Oe.
